Abstract
As he was writing Elizabeth: Apprenticeship, David Starkey confesses, he half fell in love with Princess Elizabeth.1 He was moved, in particular, by the image of Elizabeth as a girl in this striking portrait, attributed to William Scrots (Figure 4.1): “the painfully thin shoulders, exposed by the low, square-cut dress, suggest an aching vulnerability” (x). This painting, which Elizabeth may have given to Henry VIII just before his death, or perhaps to her brother, Edward VI, provides Starkey with an emblem for his biography’s account of Elizabeth, when she was little.2 It embodies, as well, a poignant alternative to the influential image of Elizabeth as Astraea or Gloriana defined by the research of Frances Yates and Roy Strong.3 Strong begins his Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (1963) by using the portrait to show how this “slip of a girl” is “transposed into a symbol,” contrasting its diminutive subject with the famous Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth, “towering above her realm of England, a vision of almost cosmic power” (9), to frame his argument about the monumental and magnificent aspects of Elizabethan self-fashioning.
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Notes
See Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)
and Roy Strong, Portraits of Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977) and Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).
Roger Ascham, The Scolemaster, in English Works ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge University Press, 1970 rpt. 2010): 219. He adds that they should be ashamed “that one mayd should go beyond you all, in excellencie of learning, and knowledge of diuers tonges.”
Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I, and the Political Uses of Androgyny” Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: University of Syracuse Press, 1986): 135–53.
Thomas Heywood, If you know not me, You know no bodie: Or, The troubles of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1605). All references to this text are to this edition. 14 Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: Gordian Press, 1969).
Thomas Churchyard, The Firste Parte of Churchyardes Chippes (London, 1575): 94v.
Cited in Alison Findlay, Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary (London: Continuum, 2010): 333.
Tiffany Jo Werth, The Fabulous Dark Cloister: Romance in England after the Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011);
Lorraine Helms, “The Saint in the Brothel: Or, Eloquence Rewarded” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 319–32.
In Lawrence Twine’s The Patterne of Painfull Adventures (London, 1576) her name is Tharsia.
The Tempest ed. Stephen Orgel. The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987): 120. All references to the play will be to this edition.
For further discussion see Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1990): 16–39.
David Lindley, “Music, masque, and meaning in The Tempest” in The Court Masque ed. David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984): 47–59.
Samuel Daniel, Vision of the Twelve Goddesses Spi. ed. Ernest Law (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1880): 67.
The Tempest ed. Frank Kermode. The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1954): 126.
Stephen Booth, “Exit, Pursued by a Gentleman Born” Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium 12 (1981): 51–66;
Margreta de Grazia, “Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West (1990): 143–56;
Patricia Parker, “Sound Government, Polymorphic Bears: The Winter’s Tale and Other Metamorphoses of Eye and Ear” The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading ed. Helen Regueiro Elam Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005): 172–90.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000): 46–77.
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© 2014 Deanne Williams
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Williams, D. (2014). Lost Girls. In: Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137024763_5
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